But there’s more, (semi)undocumented views like V$SQL_FEATURE and V$SQL_FEATURE_HIERARCHY do give us more information about what these hints relate to. For example, if you have ever wondered why is there a MERGE hint and then also a USE_MERGE hint, you can check what do these hints control using my hinth.sql (Hint Hierarchy) script:

Plenty of interesting stuff here – the new hint TABLE_LOOKUP_BY_NL that has showed up recently seems to have to do with star transformations for example (I just learned this myself from this output).

Interestingly the NLJ_BATCHING and NLJ_PREFETCH hints are considered as execution phase hints apparently (that was my term, I’m thinking about hints (also) affecting a decision in the execution phase, not just during optimization). For example, normally the NLJ prefetch feature can be dynamically turned on & off during the query execution, I guess with a hint this feature would be always enabled (I’m not sure about this here, just trying to reason why a hint is shown to be related to “execution” phase).

If optimizer feature terms like CBQT and CVM do not immediately ring a bell, you can use the V$SQL_FEATURE view (or my sqlfh.sql script) to list some more info about what these SQL feature name abbreviations mean and where in the hierarchy does this particular feature stand.

The script below doesn’t accept any parameters, prints out the entire SQL feature hierarchy (except the temporary bugfix features you can see from V$SYSTEM_FIX_CONTROL):